Pierre Poilievre And The New Right, Same As The Old Right

On Media Failure And Consistent Populism

Let’s play a fun game right now – I am going to give a description of a bill and I want you to guess the jurisdiction that either tried to or successfully did pass it, with a blanked bill name so nobody can guess it by the naming convention.

“This final proposal was drafted as [_____], which made it a criminal offence to induce an abortion on a woman at any stage unless it was done by, or under the direction of, a physician who considered that the woman's life or health was otherwise likely to be threatened.”

If you said Texas or Oklahoma or Florida or Alabama, take a bow, you are very very very wrong. That is the description of Bill C43, Brian Mulroney’s attempt to criminalize abortion that failed on a tied vote in the Senate. That is the action of Kim Campbell as Justice Minister and of Mulroney as Prime Minister, two people who have now become synonymous with “reasonable” conservatism. And I am sitting here as progressive delusion over Pierre Poilievre hits a fever pitch asking – nay, begging – one thing about everything.

The right has always been batshit, and it’s time for the media to stop pretending this is some new fucking phenomenon.

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This notion that Poilievre alone is some dangerous aberration from the past is one of those things that centristy professionals and occasional contributors to The Star keep saying, and I keep hearing it as if this is some shit from the right. If your baseline is “how Stephen Harper governed”, Poilievre would represent a shift – not one particularly rightwards, but it’s certainly a reinvention of the conservative movement away from fiscal policy as an animating anchor and towards a more explicitly culture war based conservatism. But go back a bit further, and you realize that this isn’t some aberration, it’s the story of Canadian conservatism.

We’ll get back to Mulroney and the history of abortion, but let’s go back to 2005, and the Christmastime election period before the 2006 election. The Boxing Day Shooting in Toronto – a shooting that killed one person and wounded 6 others – became a national story, both because of location and because of timing. 7 days later, Stephen Harper went to Toronto and advocated for tough on crime policies to a crowd of people, many of whom had just been on Yonge Street shopping in or by the Eaton Centre.

How’s that for fucking populist anger? Oh no, that’s only Skippy, right? But I was told it was a wave of populist anger cresting now, with COVID and vaccines and mandates, so how could it be that there has been Conservative populism for at least 17 years? It doesn’t matter that none of these tough on crime measures have done fuck all, it doesn’t matter that half of them have been struck down as unconstitutional, or that the Government knew they’d get tossed and passed them anyways, no, see, Pierre is worse in some intangible way that is never articulated.

Let’s get back to Harper, who Paul Wells (not exactly the world’s leading liberal lion) described thusly during the coalition crisis of 2008: “I hope I have made it clear since the summer that I have come to believe Stephen Harper is turning into a really bad prime minister. He is incoherent, vicious and unserious. His fall update was idiocy on stilts, and when he sent his transport minister out two days later to disown the work of his finance minister, nobody in the country blinked because nobody in the country takes what this government does as a government seriously.” But again, good old days, amirite?

Harper twice used Prorogation to avoid the wrath of the elected Commons, in both 2008 and 2009 using the tactic to end a legislative session, in 08 to avoid losing a confidence vote and in 09 to avoid handing over documents to a Commons committee on the treatment of Afghan detainees and whether or not Canada sanctioned (implicitly or explicitly) the US’ enhanced interrogation methods, aka torture. Just as Poilievre’s call to fire the Bank of Canada Governor is perfectly legal, it is seen as a breach of an important principle – just as prorogation was a routine way of cleaning the House of Commons order paper and restarting with a new Throne Speech, before Harper used it for his political purposes.

Let’s head back to Mulroney, who tried to pass an abortion bill so restrictive that it would make modern Conservatives blush in the face of a Supreme Court decision, who took advantage of a constitutional, but never before used, method to increase the number of Senators temporarily to pass the GST, because those pesky constitutional conventions are clearly meant to constrain other people (then again, a Senate voting down legislation was also in violation of those conventions).

Oh, and lest we fucking forget, Mulroney went into the 1984 election screaming populist blue murder about how a constitutional arrangement without Quebec’s signature is one that isn’t worth the paper it’s written on, and who spent his tenure in office trying to destroy the best thing Pierre Trudeau accomplished, the Charter. How’s that for populist anger, a federalist openly courting separatist votes by parroting their talking points?

I’m not even saying that Mulroney and Harper were bad Prime Ministers – I think Mulroney’s climate stuff was pretty good, and I’m a free trade fan, and I think Harper did probably about as well as could have been reasonably expected out of the GFC once he got his head out of his ass over Christmas 2008 – but the idea that the right is somehow worse today is to ignore how bad the right has been this entire fucking time. The problem is, what passed for “reasonable” political discourse in 1988 would be deemed to be hilariously right wing now, so the CPC and the conservative movement seems further from the middle now – which, may be true, but isn’t a function of them heading right, but of the country moving left.

The right in this country seems deranged and out of touch in a way now than they did, say, the day I was born because the country they wanted was mostly what they got then. Trans rights were not even on the agenda in 1997, gay rights was still a fairly fringe position, gay marriage was certainly still a pipedream, and the advances around women’s rights and racialized minorities (insufficient as they might be) were still two decades away from really kicking into gear. Back then, the right was closer to being in step on cultural issues, which is why there were more anti-gay marriage Liberals than pro-gay marriage Cons. It’s why Liberals didn’t want to touch abortion in 1988, with John Turner coming up with a bullshit “it’s a moral choice and I’m not gonna get into my views” answer. It’s why only three Conservative MPs voted for gay marriage in 2005, and why it took until 2016 for the Tory policy to officially become in favour of equal marriage.

Now, the contours of Conservatism are different – it’s now anti-vaccine mandates and fuck elites as opposed to fuck the poor, gays, and women – but the notion that this is a “creeping” populism might be some of the most absurd bullshit possible. Conservatives in this country *always* react to the circumstances with crude but populisty messaging, from tough on crime after the Boxing Day Shooting to Harper’s economic stimulus being featuring those horrible signs everywhere to the way Harper used the civil service and the courts as enemies to the way that Mulroney bent over backwards to win over Quebec separatists, the recent record of Canadian conservatism is populist bullshit and no principles.

Think about the Harper legacy – a tax cut that he chose because it would be felt every time people went shopping instead of a less regressive one, recession spending after projecting surpluses evermore, and tough on crime politics – and tell me where the deep commitment to conservative principles was. The tough on crime stuff was government intervention and the destruction of judicial discretion, but that was fine. Debt and deficits in a crisis is some Keynsian bullshit if I ever saw it, and the GST cut, as opposed to broader based tax reform that would have done broader economic good, was just pure electioneering.

You can like Pierre Poilievre or not like Pierre Poilievre. You can think he’s smart or you can think he’s dumb, you can want him to be PM or fear that day, I don’t care. But the idea that he is a “new” conservative leading “creeping” populism is a bunch of fucking bullshit, because the right has always been this way, and for the media willing to call out Poilievre to pretend this is actually some new process is to defend a lie. Find it within yourselves to tell the truth – the right has been crazy this whole time.